This chapter focuses on the performance of locally attached disk drives.
If you are not familiar with the operating system concepts of volume groups, logical and physical volumes, and logical and physical partitions, read Performance Overview of Fixed-Disk Storage Management.
File-system configuration has a large effect on overall system performance and is time-consuming to change after installation. Deciding on the number and types of hard disks, and the sizes and placements of paging spaces and logical volumes on those hard disks, is therefore a critical preinstallation process. For an extensive discussion of the considerations for preinstallation disk configuration planning, see Disk Preinstallation Guidelines.
The following sections are presented in this chapter: